Privacy and the Limits of Law

Abstract

A path-breaking analysis of the concept of privacy as a question of access to the individual and to information about him. An account of the reasons why privacy is valuable, and why it has the coherence that justified maintaining it as both a theoretical concept and an ideal. Finally, the paper looks into the move from identifying the grounds of the value of privacy to the different question of whether and to what extent privacy should be protected by laws. While privacy is a useful concept in social and moral thought, it may well be the case that it is relatively rare that it should be protected by the law in cases where its violation does not also involve infringement or violation of other important interests or values.